Abstract

Social influences on the class vote result in a higher SPD-vote of workers who live in class homogeneous environments. These environments can be operationalized as ego-centric networks. In West Germany, these social influences are restricted to older cohorts and earlier Bundestag elections. This result gets corroborated by applying a more sophisticated dynamic version of an influence model, which analyses the relationship between party identification and the vote intention. It is shown that workers who do not identify with a party get mobilized as SPD-voters during election campaigns if they have contacts with other workers. This effect cannot be observed with ALLBUS-data from 1980, 1990 and 2000 for which interviewing did not take place during election campaigns. What has not changed in the last decades is the recruitment of friends and acquaintances from the same social class and subjective class identification under the impact of class homogeneous networks. What has changed is the politisation of these class homogeneous networks.

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